Museums of madness?

摘要

Diane Lockley's 'Looking back' article on Leicestershire's first lunatic asylum (June 2012) is interesting. However, it seems to have been written with little reference to the wider context. This leads to a number of issues, but this letter will only comment upon one. Her main thesis is that this institution was 'curative'. It is the case that many of the earlier public asylums, with Lancaster being the prime example, were influenced by the principles of 'moral treatment' especially as practised at the Retreat, a Quaker private asylum in York. (Here the term 'moral' is being used in an older sense roughly approximating to mental', and not necessarily with the ethical connotations that the word has today.)